Men, does your weedy physique or receding hair line make you feel inadequate? Women, do you worry about wrinkles or whether to brave the pain of a bikini-line Brazilian wax? Ever feel that all of us, every day, are bombarded with images of physical ...

For as long as men and women have looked at the stars, they have read in the distant constellations stories of life close to home, filling the sky with maidens and monsters, lovers and heroes, hunters and beasts. Japan, though, is unusual in having ...

Japan may be famously crazy about cherry blossoms, but the sakuranbo of Sagae City, Yamagata Prefecture, don’t attract attention until long after their white flowers have fallen off. Sakuranbo are fruit cherries, and Sagae and neighboring Higashine cultivate more of them than anywhere else ...

Man Ray was master of an art form for which he nonetheless professed “a certain amount of contempt”: photography. His first love was painting, and he persistently denied the artistry of the medium that made him famous. But it is largely thanks to his ...

A BURDEN OF FLOWERS, by Natsuki Ikezawa. Kodansha International, 2001, 239 pp., 2,400 yen (cloth) A story of two Japanese siblings’ rejection of Western values, one eloquent on the dangers of being “too Cartesian in your thinking, too tied up in Western rationalism,” is ...

“Arbeit macht frei (Work brings freedom)” were the words famously written above the gates of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where Austrian-born artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis was murdered in a gas chamber on Oct. 9, 1944. Friedl’s life, however, had been devoted to a different, truer ...

There may indeed be “more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of” in human philosophy, as Hamlet told faithful Horatio, but when it comes to hell, the human imagination needs little prompting. From Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy” to the Bible itself, hell ...

From the back of the theater sounds a regular beat, quiet at first, then mounting in volume. In dances a slender woman wearing a tight chef’s jacket and hat. She is holding aloft a frying pan and, well, playing it. Three men follow her, ...

In the autumn of 1549, a holy man and his companion began wandering the Satsuma domain of southern Kyushu, preaching the glory of the Sun Buddha Dainichi. The man, who called himself a so (monk), was reported to come from the “Land of Buddha” ...

The career of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1919), as it unfolds in a new retrospective at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, is like watching art history run backward. Its culmination — the glowing colors and dynamic abstraction he made his own — introduced a ...